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Referencing in the MHRA Style

For all academic assignments it is vital that you acknowledge the sources of information you

have used for your research. This will help you protect yourself against charges of plagiarismand also demonstrate that you understand the importance of professional academic work.

You must acknowledge your sources whenever you paraphrase or summarise another person's

ideas, or when you quote another person's work, or use tables, graphs, images, etc. which you

have found from another source, whether printed or online. This guide explains how this is done

in the MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) Style.

Introducing the MHRA styleWhenever you refer to another’s words or ideas in your work, insert a footnote number in your text.

When referring to the publication for the first time, give full bibliographic details in the footnote.Subsequent references can then be provided in an abbreviated form.

Inserting footnotesWherever possible, place numbers at the end of the sentence, after the full stop. Be consistent in your

approach and use continuous numbering throughout the text, starting at number one. For theses, re-

start the numbering at the beginning of each chapter. When you refer to several sources close

together in the same paragraph, use one footnote number and enter a reference for each source,

separated by a semi-colon.

To insert footnotes in Microsoft Word, position the cursor in the text where you wish the number to be

placed. On the menu bar, select Insert – Reference – Footnote. In the dialogue box which opens,

click on Insert to add a footnote.

Example

References should be given for ‘all direct or indirect quotations, and in acknowledgement of

someone’s opinions, or of a source of factual information which is not general knowledge’.1 Li

and Crane point out that the main objective of citing references is to give sufficient information

to allow sources to be located.2 Additionally, ‘another important principle is to make reference

to that information in the source in hand. As a rule, it is not necessary to provide supplementary

information that has to be located elsewhere’.3 General overviews of the process of citing

references are given by Bosworth and Craig and in Walliman.4

______________________

1 Nicholas S.R. Walliman, Your Research Project: A Step-by-step Guide for the First-time

Researcher (London: SAGE, 2001), p. 301.

2 Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane, Electronic Styles: A Handbook for Citing Electronic Information,

2nd edn (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 1996), p. 3.

3 Ibid., p. 3.

4 David P. Bosworth, Citing Your References: A Guide for Authors of Journal Articles and

Students Writing Theses or Dissertations (Thirsk, N Yorks: Underhill Press, 1992); P.

Craig, ‘How to Cite’, Documentation Studies, 10 (2003), 114-122; Walliman, pp. 300-313.

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For further help or information contact your nearest library. Seewww.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/libraries/locations

Directly quoting from your sourcesYou should aim to paraphrase information provided by an author in your own words rather than quote

large amounts of their work verbatim as this helps to demonstrate to the reader your understanding of the

information. It may be necessary to quote directly from the text when you:

cannot present the information more succinctly or in any other way

need to present a particular portion of an author’s text in your work to analyse it.

If the quotation is short (fewer than 40 words of prose or 2 complete lines of verse), enclose the writer’s

words in single quotation marks within your sentence and insert a footnote number:

Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art ‘heralded the birth of a new style in 20 th century

European Architecture’.1

Longer quotations should be separated from the body of your text and indented from the left-hand

margin. There is no need to include quotation marks:

Bernard outlines his design ethos:

Mackintosh’s firm belief that construction should be decorated and not decoration

constructed, in other words that the salient and most requisite features should be

selected for ornamentation, he applied with great rhythm and inventiveness, especially in

those projects, such as the Glasgow School of Art and Scotland Street School, where

budgets were severely limited. 2

This theme is taken further by Macleod.3

If you omit some words from the middle of the quotation, you need to indicate this by typing three dots in

square brackets, e.g. ‘The state has an essential role […] in the legal definition of property rights’.4

If you are omitting lines of verse, write […] on a separate line.

Referencing sources for the first time

When referencing a source for the first time in your piece of work, provide full bibliographic details in the

footnote:

Write the author’s name(s) as it appears on the text : put the author’s forename(s) or initials first,

followed by their surname. If there are more than three authors, write the first author’s namefollowed by ‘and others’.

Italicise the titles of books and journals.

Capitalise the first letter of all principal words throughout the title and after the colon, if there is a

subtitle.

Include the specific page number(s) referenced at the end by writing p. or pp. followed by the

page number(s).

Write references for online publications using the format for printed publications as far as

possible, adding the and the [accessed date].

Indent the second and subsequent line of each reference.

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Book

Robert Abel, The Eye Care Revolution: Prevent and Reverse

Common Vision Problems (New York: Kensington Books, 2004),

p. 10.

Journal articleLawrence Ang and Ben Taylor , ‘Managing Customer Profitability

Using Portfolio Matrices’, Journal of Database Marketing and

Customer Strategy Management, 12 (2005), 298-304 (p. 300).

Chapter in an edited book

Tadao Ando, ‘Towards New Horizons in Architecture’, in Theorizing

a New Agenda for Architecture, ed. by Kate Nesbitt (New York:

Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 462-530 (p. 473).

Newspaper article

Bertrand Benoit, ‘G8 Faces Impasse on Global Warming’, Financial

Times, 29 May 2007, p. 9.

PhD Thesis

Alun R.J. Withey, ‘Medical Knowledge and Practice in Early Modern

Wales’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cardiff University, 2006),

p. 17.

Electronic journal article

Anwar T. Merchant and others, ‘Diet, Physical Activity, and Adiposity

in Children in Poor and Rich Neighbourhoods: A Cross-sectional Comparison’, Nutrition Journal , 6 (2007)

[accessed 10 May 2007] (p. 1).

Web page

Christel Lane and others, The Future of Professionalised Work: UK

and Germany Compared (London: Anglo-German Foundation

for the Study of Industrial Society, 2003)

[accessed 12

December 2007] (p. 11).

Sound recording

Jean Sibelius, Symphony No.1 Op.39 in E Minor: The Oceanides.

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Cond. Simon Rattle,

CD, EMI CDM 7 64119 2 (1991).

Images, figures and tables

Fig. 1. List of housing performance indicators for multi-family

residential buildings.1

For a Master’s-level work,

write unpublished master’s

thesis.

Begin with the author and title

of the chapter. Also provide

the chapter page numbers

(preceded by pp.).

Include the volume number

and page range (not

preceded by pp.). Issue

numbers are only required

where every issue starts at

page 1. In this case write

the issue number after the

volume e.g. 3.3

If a journal is only available

online, use this instead of

ournal article. If page orparagraph numbers are not

available, omit them.

Include the day and month of

publication.

If no author is given,

reference the organisation

responsible or begin with the

title instead. If no ownership

is detectable, you should

question whether the source is

of sufficient quality.

Provide the title of the image,

figure or table followed by the

footnote number. Write the

reference for the source of

the image, figure or table inthe footnote.

Include the composer/artist,

orchestra/performer,

conductor, medium (LP, CD), CD

reference number, year of

recording.

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Further references to the same source

If you reference the same source more than once in a particular piece of work, abbreviate the second and

subsequent references by providing only the author and page numbers. Use the abbreviation Ibid.

(meaning in the same place) to refer to a reference immediately above:

Bibliography

At the end of your work, list each of the sources you have referenced, and any other works you have read

in relation to the subject, in a bibliography. Write the list in alphabetical order by the first author’s

surname, placing their surname before their forename(s) or initial(s). There is no need to include the

specific page reference in a bibliography, but page ranges for edited book chapters and journal articles

are required. You should also exclude the full stop at the end of the reference:

Publication dates and editions

To find out when a book was published, look at the back of the title page. This page will contain details of

the publisher and the publication date. If there is more than one date, use the latest publication date, not

the latest reprint date. This is often located next to the © symbol.

If no publication date is given in the book but it can be ascertained, put the year in square brackets e.g.

[1989]. If no year can be determined write [n.d.], meaning no date.

The back of the title page will also tell you the edition of the book. If the book you are acknowledging is

not the first edition, state this in the full reference in your footnote and bibliography e.g:

Alan Everett, Materials , 5th edn (Harlow: Longman, 1994), pp. 102-24.

Further help and advice on avoiding plagiarismFor further guidance on the MHRA style, refer to the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors,

Editors, and Writers of Theses. For guidance on plagiarism, visit the Academic Integrity web site at

www.cf.ac.uk/regis/sfs/academic/ . A short online tutorial on Avoiding Plagiarism is available at

http://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/plagiarism/tutorial/ .

But028 - Q -10 / October 2015 / RM - Also available in alternative formats.

1 William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 , 3rd edn (London: Phaidon, 1996),

pp. 124-32.

2 Ibid., p. 133.

3 James Stevens Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2nd edn

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 1.

4 Curtis, pp. 56-78.

Borden, Iain, and Katerina Ruedi, The Dissertation: An Architecture Student’s Handbook , 5th edn

(Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006)

Craig, P., ‘How to Cite’, Documentation Studies, 10 (2003), 114-122

Stott, Rebecca, Anna Snaith and Rick Rylance, Making Your Case: A Practical Guide to Essay Writing (Harlow: Longman, 2001)
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